Trump, Kim Summit Set for Singapore in June

After weeks of speculation, President Trump announced by tweet that a place and date has been set for what would be the first meeting ever between the sitting president of the United States and the leader of North Korea, Kim Jong-un, in Singapore.

The highly anticipated meeting between Kim Jong Un and myself will take place in Singapore on June 12th. We will both try to make it a very special moment for World Peace!

Administration officials have been instructed to move forward with plans to convene a historic summit between President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in Singapore, according to two people familiar with the plans.

The decision is ultimately up to Trump, who said on Wednesday he would announce the time and location in three days.

Speaking to reporters at the White House, Trump ruled out the demilitarized zone (DMZ) that divides North and South Korea as a potential location for the talks with Kim. Singapore and the DMZ are the only two places Trump has floated in public as potential venues for the meeting.

The Southeast Asian city-state has been the preferred location among US officials, who saw its neutrality as an advantage over locations closer to Pyongyang.

The president is not being shy in his lofty goals for the historic meeting.

The president said his "proudest achievement" will be the denuclearization of the Korean peninsula. "This is what people have been waiting for for a long time." WH has yet to formally announce the date and place of @POTUS meeting with Kim Jong-un, but its thought to be Singapore. pic.twitter.com/55aIHSIAaU

The President was also accompanied by Vice President Mike Pence and his wife Karen at Joint Base Andrews outside Washington.

The three former detainees will be transported to Walter Reed National Military Medical Centre for further evaluation and medical treatment, the White House said.

During the middle-of-the-night welcome ceremony, Mr Trump thanked North Korea’s Kim Jong-un for releasing the three Americans from captivity, saying he believed Mr Kim wanted to reach an agreement on denuclearising the Korean Peninsula.

“I really think [Mr Kim] wants to do something,” Mr Trump said. He said talks between his administration and the North Korean Government had “never been taken this far”.

The three men were released as Secretary of State Mike Pompeo left Pyongyang after meeting with Mr Kim, amid final plans for a Trump-Kim summit. N orth Korea had accused the three Korean-Americans of anti-state activities. Their arrests were widely seen as politically motivated and had compounded the dire state of relations over the isolated nation’s nuclear weapons.

The DPRK has a long history of “hostage diplomacy”, and the returning of such prisoners has occurred several times in recent years. CNN:

Freeing prisoners from North Korea, in recent years, has largely required a high-level emissary of sorts.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, the same person negotiating terms of the US-North Korea summit, went to Pyongyang to retrieve Kim Dong Chul, Kim Hak-song and Kim Sang Duk, who’s also known as Tony Kim.

Then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper went to retrieve Kenneth Bae along with Matthew Todd Miller, both of whom were accused of “hostile acts.” They were released in November of 2014 after spending months in a hard labor camp.

An outburst on CNN by Dennis Rodman, who slammed Bae, then in prison, after the former basketball star met with Kim Jong Un, helped draw attention to Bae.

The journalists Laura Ling and Euna Lee were freed after former President Bill Clinton traveled to Pyongyang in August of 2009 to ask for their release and to collect them.

Other releases have had unhappy endings. The American student Otto Warmbier was released by North Korea in 2017 when he was in a coma. He died shortly after returning home. His family members attended the State of the Union address this year as Trump’s guests.

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Born and raised in West Virginia, Andrew has since lived and traveled around the world several times over. Though frequently writing about politics out of a sense of duty and love of country, most of the time he would prefer discussions on history, culture, occasionally nerding on aviation, and his amateur foodie tendencies. He can usually be found misspelling/misusing words on Twitter @four4thefire.

4 Responses

Looking it up Orchard Towers is still there – though tbqh, I had to find the real name using a different key word search. I imagine also it isn’t today quite the same place as it was in the waning years of the 20th century.Report

I don’t know if this counts as a theory or just idle speculation, but I tend to believe that every president has one good success, and maybe something like a N. Korea deal that makes peace more plausible will be Trump’s. I’d settle for “Trump letting himself be the instrument of more thoughtful actors and world events that leads to this end” over “Trump securing this good outcome because he’s good at what he does.” The latter is much less likely than the former, in my opinion.

Of course, it’s possible I’m just being naive about the prospects for a workable peace or settlement there. The (valid) points about “hostage diplomacy”–as well as the history of the region since 1950–give me pause.Report

Well a lot of it depends on defining expectations going in and spin. The NK’s may be willing to make a lot of gestures and play a lot of lip service so long as actual de facto denuclearization is off the table.Report

It's funny how browsers I think are a thing (specifically Vivaldi and Brave) don't even register on this list. Goes to show my techie bubble.

Browsers used to have better names. Netscape was brilliant. What the heck is a Firefox? (It's "Firebird" with IP considerations is what it is.) Chrome? Edge? Edge? Come on.

It's amazing how quickly Chrome accomplished what Firefox never did. It just goes to show the power of corporate muscle. When Google announced they were creating a browser I thought it was kind of dumb. I was wrong.

People say Firefox is better than Chrome now but I just can't get into the groove of it. Chrome doesn't work right on one of my computers and I use Firefox on it. it's passable, but I wish Chrome worked on it.

With Internet Explorer being replaced by Edge and Edge being Chrome-based, that means may be looking at 3 of the top 5 and 85% of desktop browsing occurring through Chromium browsers. That's concerning.

The ship's presence, he speculated, might have been related to the testing of a nuclear-powered cruise missile.

Did Trump tweet anything about this, you ask?

The United States is learning much from the failed missile explosion in Russia. We have similar, though more advanced, technology. The Russian “Skyfall” explosion has people worried about the air around the facility, and far beyond. Not good!

As some of you know, I lost my father two weeks ago. My mother called me that Friday afternoon and said, in not such direct words, that “you better try to get up here if you can.”

I did, but I was too late. But in the aftermath of it, it was good to be there. My mother and I ate together for two weeks (my brother and his family are coming in later, such are the vagaries of scheduling bereavement leave in a government agency). We cooked some favorite things. My mom roasted a chicken and then laughed ruefully and said “I guess it’ll be harder to use a whole one up now” and the day after that, we made a favorite chicken enchilada recipe given us by a former minister of her church who had lived in the Southwest. And she baked a favorite cake of ours (my father was diabetic and we had to be careful about sweets in the house, and also baking was hard while he was so unwell). I think it helped, maybe?

There’s a German word, Kummerspeck, which literally means “Grief-bacon” and is used to refer to the weight you put on while grieving. I had scoffed at that before because the more minor griefs (eg., breakups) I had suffered made me NOT want to eat…..but I know I’ve put on a couple pounds in the last two weeks and will have to explain to my doctor when I go in for my checkup on Tuesday….

And people brought in food – lasagna, and bread, and other things.

And we went out to eat lunch a couple times; before my father’s health failed so much going out to restaurants was a favorite thing and my mom hadn’t been able to do it, really, for six months or more while he was needing her care.

When I spoke to her today after I got home, she noted that even though she had told the ‘church ladies’ who do bereavement lunches she didn’t want them to go to the trouble for the memorial service this fall (we have some people with some specific dietary concerns coming), someone did call her back and suggest a dessert-and-coffee reception before the service and I urged her to have them do that – I have fixed things many times for funeral lunches at my own church and it feels very much like it’s one kindness I can do for the family, and having a piece of cake or a few cookies may make small talk easier in a time when it’s going to be hard.

I admit I always rolled my eyes over the “how to relate to your weird dumb relative who isn’t like you” pieces, or, worse, the “you should refuse to spend time with them or try to harangue them into your viewpoint over the Thanksgiving table” pieces, because my family has a lot of….different…..people in it, and we’ve always managed. You talk about other stuff, that’s all. You talk about how a favorite team is doing or the funny things someone’s kids are doing or you share memories….

Jeffrey Epstein, the millionaire financier and accused sex trafficker, is dead by suicide, according to three officials familiar with the matter.

The officials told NBC News he was found at 7:30 a.m. ET at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York and that he hanged himself.

Epstein accuser claims she was ordered to have sex with prominent men

He was transported Saturday morning from the Metropolitan Correctional Center to a hospital in Lower Manhattan. Upon arrival, he was in cardiac arrest, people familiar with the matter say.

Epstein, 66, was being held on federal sex trafficking charges.

He was arrested July 6 in Teterboro, New Jersey, as he returned from Paris on a private jet.

He had pleaded not guilty and was denied bail.

The indictment on his case showed that he sought out minors, some as young as 14, from at least 2002 through 2005 and paying them hundreds of dollars in cash for sex at either his Manhattan townhouse or his estate in Palm Beach, Florida, federal prosecutors revealed last month.

Epstein was charged with one count of sex trafficking conspiracy and one count of sex trafficking. He faced up to 45 years in prison if found guilty.